Problem Novel:A Hero Ain't Nothin' But a Sandwich is a classic example of a problem novel, which deals with a contemporary problem, but doesn't necessarily offer any solutions. Instead, Heroraises as many questions as it answers, in part because we see Benji's drug addiction from multiple points of view. Each member of his family has a different take on Benji's drug addiction and how to solve it. His grandmother believes her grandson ultimately suffers from a spiritual sickness that can only be cured by Jesus. Benji's mother, at the urging of his grandmother, takes him to a spiritual advisor to chase the devil out of him in order to cure his addiction. Both Benji's mother and Butler want him in a substance abuse program, but aren't sure how to deal with him when he gets out since this program alone is not enough to cure an addiction. The addict must have the willpower to overcome dependency as well as have the moral courage to see himself as ultimately responsible for his problem. At first, Butler and Rose both believe that Benji's problem is rooted in his biological father's rejection of him, and his refusal to let Butler be a father figure to him. But ultimately, Butler is not enough to save Benji. While Butler can save Benji from falling off of the roof, he is not cured when in order to calm his nerves from the withdrawal, he writes 100 times on a piece of paper "Butler is my father" and leaves it in Butler's overcoat for him to find. Benji tells Butler that he can overcome his addiction if only someone will believe him, which puts the responsibility for his wellness on others. But Butler disagrees, telling his stepson to "be [his] own man, the supervisor of [his] veins, the night watchman and day shift foreman in charge-a [his] own affairs" (119-20). This is the turning point in the novel, which ends with Butler standing on the street corner to meet Benji and walk him to his outpatient program. We clearly see that Butler believes in Benji, but what is yet to be seen is whether or not Benji believes in himself enough to follow through.
Hero also discusses drug addiction as something larger than the addict. The addict doesn't acquire his/her habit in a vacuum. There has to be a supplier. For Benji, his drug addiction is also a consequence of poverty (thought of course, not all addicts are poor). Benji's principal ruminates on the pernicious effects of poverty which he sees as more than just a lack of money. "Poverty is as complicated as high finance," leading its victims to adopt various coping mechanisms to "continue to stand up under humiliation and abuse" (56). Some buy expensive clothes they can't afford to hide their lack of material wealth from the world and from themselves, others exploit their impoverished neighbors, seeing them as easy marks since they police don't really care what happens to any of them, and that exploitation leads to selling drugs to others desperate for a mental way out of poverty. Nigeria Greene believes that drug addition, along with many of the other problems he sees around him, is due to racism. He thinks that "it's a wonder that every Black person in the U. S. of A. hasn't gone stark, ravin from racism . . . and the hurtin its put on us" (41). To counteract this hurt, Nigeria has decided to teach black kids, to "be the Black Messiah of the classroom" who will "light the way with Blackness" (44). But it is not easy to be the Black Messiah of the classroom. Other teachers, both black and white, complain about his students having a chip on their shoulder after being exposed to Nigeria's teaching. Bernard Cohen questions whether or not "it's healthy for kids to learn nothing but Black history, Black supremacy, and Black power," (35) which is what he sees Nigeria as trying to teach to his students. In Bernard's mind, what he sees as a steady diet of Afro-entrism doesn't so much empower them as it causes them to have more difficulty dealing with the majority culture. While the novel doesn't squarely name any one cause of Benji's addiction, it does indicate his problem is due to a failure to be content with himself or to see himself as able to do better. Butler has made peace with his own life. While he has to work at something he doesn't like, he has few wants--"a place where you can close the door and shut the people-eaters out of your life . . . a music box with a good sound, a name-brand bottle that can be tasted now and then, food in the box, and a glad rag or two to wear when you want to make a extra-nice appearance" (20-21). And Benji's best friend Jimmie-Lee Powell has opted to not even take drugs because he's "got somethin else for a dollar to do" and getting high is not something he really wants to do because his "brain is into a lotta things" and he doesn't want to get caught off guard in "this bad-ass wilderness" (23).
Cultural Context of the Work
Events in History at the Time of the Novel
Urban blacks in the early 1970s. The gains made by African Americans as a result of the civil rights movement of the 1950s and 1960s lay mostly in the realm of their status as citizens. The Civil Rights Act of 1964 and the Voting Rights Act of 1965 legally abolished segregation and discrimination, but "legal equality in principle did not make for justice in practice" (Pinkney, p. 62). Despite the victories of the civil rights movement, many blacks still resided in segregated areas with a far lower standard of living and more limited life options than whites.
Urban blacks felt this especially keenly. In the early 1970s, nearly half of black America lived in segregated city ghettos in dangerous, rundown buildings with constantly interrupted water and heating services. Schools had few materials, including textbooks, and often there was not even enough room for students to sit. Throughout black urban areas the infant mortality rate was twice as high as for white infants. Jobs were scarce and often menial, a situation that, combined with the substandard housing, contributed to the breakup of the black family unit. However, this type of breakup was far from always the case. In fact, the majority of black families in the 1970s included both a husband and a wife.
The civil rights movement and Black Power. The civil rights movement awakened the political consciousness of urban blacks. "It's nation time!" Nigeria Greene, the novel's schoolteacher, says repeatedly to anyone who will listen. In real life, the idea of black nationhood took many forms and meant many different things to urban blacks of the early 1970s. One aspect of "nation" was the concept of Black Power, that is, self-empowerment achieved by blacks taking control of civil rights organizations as well as other elements in their lives. Some Black Power advocates demanded a separate nation within the United States, while others encouraged blacks to keep their money within their own community by shopping only at black-owned businesses. Still other Black Power champions attempted socialistic collectives, whose black resident members would pool both their resources and their wealth.
In keeping with the concept of Black Power, black communities began to demand more control over their institutions, such as local schools and police departments. Their efforts were often met with great resistance. One Harlem teacher wrote in his diary of a rift that developed between black parents and the Board of Education in the selection of a new principal for a predominantly black school:
The parents are preparing for a long fight to get the [black] acting principal appointed principal … the Board will react in its customary manner. It will sit on this problem, wait until the parents grow weary, and then act against them. The Board can wait. It is never in a hurry to do anything in this area.
(Raskins, pp. 25, 28)
Another reason for the growth of the Black Power movement was a suspicion that the civil rights movement, which called for integration with whites, was increasingly shutting out working-class blacks. Middle-class blacks were accused of not caring about the liberation of all African Americans, but only about liberation insofar as it affected their status and acceptance by whites. In the novel, Nigeria Greene, a middle-class black, feels torn between the urge to make a better life for himself by integrating into white culture, and the temptation to join the Black Power call for separating from white culture and any "help" it offers. He attends a benefit sponsored by middle-class blacks and whites:
We so-called "high achievers"-doctors, lawyers, teachers … most of us now makin a buck offa either "puttin down the nigga" or "upliftin the nigga" on some specially "funded" gigs … we're the upper strata welfare recipients, dig? … drinkin our mash outta long-stem champagne glasses… we have turned into the most insensitive bunch you'll find anywhere west of hell.
(Childress, A Hero Ain't Nothin' but a Sandwich, p. 98)
Nigeria's dilemma of feeling as if he must abandon his black roots to reap the rewards of integration into a higher economic strata pricked the conscience of many upwardly mobile blacks.
Conspiracy to quell Black Power with heroin?. Charles Rangel, a Harlem congressman in the early 1970s, said of his district, "Walk along any street uptown and you'll see Harlem's great addict army-slumped over in doorways, stumbling along in a trance, nodding in front of bars, standing in the cold without enough clothes on" (Rangel in Kunnes, p. 83). Officials and residents of Harlem and other slum areas across the country sought to combat heroin use by trying to identify the source of it. Did the problem lie in the individual weakness of every user? Was society's racism causing users to quit on life and nod away until they died? Or did the trouble start with the drug dealers, the ones who, as Ben-jie's stepfather says, "livin offa Benjie's veins, while they ride round in limousines" (A Hero Ain't Nothin' but a Sandwich, p. 126)? Many believed that poverty, racism, and the sense of alienation they produced made people likely addicts. Some suggested a more sinister cause of the heroin epidemic, which by the early 1970s was claiming one out of every six Harlemites. Social scientist Michael Rossman spoke of a white conspiracy to put blacks into an eternal daze. "Before each 'long hot summer' and in each period of ghetto political tension, heroin becomes increasingly available to the ghettoes" (Rossman in Kunnes, p. 87). He contended that the black urban uprisings of the late 1960s frightened white officials, who reacted by up-ping the flow of heroin into ghettoes. He was not alone in this suspicion. A New York Times article in 1971 quoted a police informer as saying that "the police had allowed and encouraged narcotics to be sold in black … communities to create a dependency on heroin and undercut political movement" (Kunnes, p. 88).
African and American roots. In an effort to redefine themselves as something other than second-class citizens, American blacks began to investigate the history of their African ancestors. They also studied modern African culture in search of a unifying and positive identity that the experience of slavery in America had acted to erase. In the novel, teacher Nigeria Greene takes this idea to heart as he fights for a class at his school in an African language, Swahili. Real-life blacks similarly attempted to develop a stronger sense of self by rejecting white standards of beauty, such as straight hair. There was an effort to express a sense of "blackness" by wearing Afro hairstyles and adopting African-style dress to show pride in the ancestry of American blacks.
Speaking Black English was another way of expressing blackness and declaring allegiance to the group in the 1970s. The "street culture" language, which developed in insular communities, helped blacks distinguish themselves from others. When Benjie uses phrases in the novel like "Then I decide to sound on him" rather than "I told him what I think," he's subscribing to a dialect of Black English; speaking the dialect knits him to his community and his history (A Hero Ain't Nothiri but a Sandwich, p. 13).
Though dialects of Black English have consistent rules and grammar of their own, the language has not been readily accepted as an alternative to standard English. In the 1970s tension mounted between blacks promoting solidarity through language and others demanding conformity to standard English. Teachers were alarmed by the use of Black English and the seeming disregard for standard English: "They attribute mistakes [in standard English] to laziness, sloppiness or the child's natural disposition to be wrong" wrote researchers (Labov, p. 4). Educators questioned how students would ever learn to communicate past the ghetto. Some recommended that they be forced to abandon their dialects of English, while others urged teachers to accept and learn them, so that the students would be encouraged to regard standard English as a possible form of expression as well.
The black family. The breakup of the traditional black nuclear family has its roots in the forced separation of families during slave days, when members were sold to different slaveowners. But, as social scientists have pointed out, "family destruction and dispersal did not erode family and kinship ties" (Mintz and Kellogg, p. 69). Instead, African Americans developed extended networks between more distant relatives and other community members as they cooperated to improve their living conditions.
In black ghettos of the 1970s a redefinition of "the family" became necessary as a growing number of fathers, under the strain of unemployment or underemployment, left the family unit. Often such a man's sense of self as one who should provide for his family was undercut by his lack of access to jobs with reasonable pay, and this burden on his pride was sometimes too much to bear. In the novel, after his father leaves, we see Benjie's family reconfigured to form a unit that is "a source of mutual assistance and support … sharing resources and responsibilities" (Mintz and Kellogg, p. 79). Ranson Bell, Benjie's grandmother, lives with the family, taking care of Benjie when his mother is working. Then the family structure shifts again when Benjie's stepfather joins the household. The final unit, a single mother living with a man who is not the father of her children, was not uncommon for families in urban areas affected by racism, poverty, and unemployment.
childress-trouble in mind
The Outsiders
S.E. Hinton Biography
S.E. Hinton Website
A. Themes:
Hinton shows many coming of age issues, successfully overcoming a variety of issues, including the following:
Greasers and Soc’s the same inside- different outside
Being proud of your stereotypes and culture even if you don’t like it
B. Comparison between book and movie
Did Hinton feminize the Greasers? If so, did she do this to get readers to connect with the characters?
C. Intertextuality:
Comparison between Ragged Dick and The Outsiders
Similar to West Side Story
D. Cultural Context of the Work:
2. 1967 Context?
E. Other Resources:
mapping a history of ya lit
doing the decades in ya
ya lit a hard sell
right to read
ya lit for males
A Hero Ain't Nothin' But a Sandwich
Alice Childress Biography
trouble in mind
Poverty in *Hero...*
*Hero* in Lit Circles
Problem Novel: A Hero Ain't Nothin' But a Sandwich is a classic example of a problem novel, which deals with a contemporary problem, but doesn't necessarily offer any solutions. Instead, Heroraises as many questions as it answers, in part because we see Benji's drug addiction from multiple points of view. Each member of his family has a different take on Benji's drug addiction and how to solve it. His grandmother believes her grandson ultimately suffers from a spiritual sickness that can only be cured by Jesus. Benji's mother, at the urging of his grandmother, takes him to a spiritual advisor to chase the devil out of him in order to cure his addiction. Both Benji's mother and Butler want him in a substance abuse program, but aren't sure how to deal with him when he gets out since this program alone is not enough to cure an addiction. The addict must have the willpower to overcome dependency as well as have the moral courage to see himself as ultimately responsible for his problem. At first, Butler and Rose both believe that Benji's problem is rooted in his biological father's rejection of him, and his refusal to let Butler be a father figure to him. But ultimately, Butler is not enough to save Benji. While Butler can save Benji from falling off of the roof, he is not cured when in order to calm his nerves from the withdrawal, he writes 100 times on a piece of paper "Butler is my father" and leaves it in Butler's overcoat for him to find. Benji tells Butler that he can overcome his addiction if only someone will believe him, which puts the responsibility for his wellness on others. But Butler disagrees, telling his stepson to "be [his] own man, the supervisor of [his] veins, the night watchman and day shift foreman in charge-a [his] own affairs" (119-20). This is the turning point in the novel, which ends with Butler standing on the street corner to meet Benji and walk him to his outpatient program. We clearly see that Butler believes in Benji, but what is yet to be seen is whether or not Benji believes in himself enough to follow through.
Hero also discusses drug addiction as something larger than the addict. The addict doesn't acquire his/her habit in a vacuum. There has to be a supplier. For Benji, his drug addiction is also a consequence of poverty (thought of course, not all addicts are poor). Benji's principal ruminates on the pernicious effects of poverty which he sees as more than just a lack of money. "Poverty is as complicated as high finance," leading its victims to adopt various coping mechanisms to "continue to stand up under humiliation and abuse" (56). Some buy expensive clothes they can't afford to hide their lack of material wealth from the world and from themselves, others exploit their impoverished neighbors, seeing them as easy marks since they police don't really care what happens to any of them, and that exploitation leads to selling drugs to others desperate for a mental way out of poverty.
Nigeria Greene believes that drug addition, along with many of the other problems he sees around him, is due to racism. He thinks that "it's a wonder that every Black person in the U. S. of A. hasn't gone stark, ravin from racism . . . and the hurtin its put on us" (41). To counteract this hurt, Nigeria has decided to teach black kids, to "be the Black Messiah of the classroom" who will "light the way with Blackness" (44). But it is not easy to be the Black Messiah of the classroom. Other teachers, both black and white, complain about his students having a chip on their shoulder after being exposed to Nigeria's teaching. Bernard Cohen questions whether or not "it's healthy for kids to learn nothing but Black history, Black supremacy, and Black power," (35) which is what he sees Nigeria as trying to teach to his students. In Bernard's mind, what he sees as a steady diet of Afro-entrism doesn't so much empower them as it causes them to have more difficulty dealing with the majority culture.
While the novel doesn't squarely name any one cause of Benji's addiction, it does indicate his problem is due to a failure to be content with himself or to see himself as able to do better. Butler has made peace with his own life. While he has to work at something he doesn't like, he has few wants--"a place where you can close the door and shut the people-eaters out of your life . . . a music box with a good sound, a name-brand bottle that can be tasted now and then, food in the box, and a glad rag or two to wear when you want to make a extra-nice appearance" (20-21). And Benji's best friend Jimmie-Lee Powell has opted to not even take drugs because he's "got somethin else for a dollar to do" and getting high is not something he really wants to do because his "brain is into a lotta things" and he doesn't want to get caught off guard in "this bad-ass wilderness" (23).
Cultural Context of the Work
Events in History at the Time of the Novel
Urban blacks in the early 1970s. The gains made by African Americans as a result of the civil rights movement of the 1950s and 1960s lay mostly in the realm of their status as citizens. The Civil Rights Act of 1964 and the Voting Rights Act of 1965 legally abolished segregation and discrimination, but "legal equality in principle did not make for justice in practice" (Pinkney, p. 62). Despite the victories of the civil rights movement, many blacks still resided in segregated areas with a far lower standard of living and more limited life options than whites.
Urban blacks felt this especially keenly. In the early 1970s, nearly half of black America lived in segregated city ghettos in dangerous, rundown buildings with constantly interrupted water and heating services. Schools had few materials, including textbooks, and often there was not even enough room for students to sit. Throughout black urban areas the infant mortality rate was twice as high as for white infants. Jobs were scarce and often menial, a situation that, combined with the substandard housing, contributed to the breakup of the black family unit. However, this type of breakup was far from always the case. In fact, the majority of black families in the 1970s included both a husband and a wife.
The civil rights movement and Black Power. The civil rights movement awakened the political consciousness of urban blacks. "It's nation time!" Nigeria Greene, the novel's schoolteacher, says repeatedly to anyone who will listen. In real life, the idea of black nationhood took many forms and meant many different things to urban blacks of the early 1970s. One aspect of "nation" was the concept of Black Power, that is, self-empowerment achieved by blacks taking control of civil rights organizations as well as other elements in their lives. Some Black Power advocates demanded a separate nation within the United States, while others encouraged blacks to keep their money within their own community by shopping only at black-owned businesses. Still other Black Power champions attempted socialistic collectives, whose black resident members would pool both their resources and their wealth.
In keeping with the concept of Black Power, black communities began to demand more control over their institutions, such as local schools and police departments. Their efforts were often met with great resistance. One Harlem teacher wrote in his diary of a rift that developed between black parents and the Board of Education in the selection of a new principal for a predominantly black school:
The parents are preparing for a long fight to get the [black] acting principal appointed principal … the Board will react in its customary manner. It will sit on this problem, wait until the parents grow weary, and then act against them. The Board can wait. It is never in a hurry to do anything in this area.
(Raskins, pp. 25, 28)
Another reason for the growth of the Black Power movement was a suspicion that the civil rights movement, which called for integration with whites, was increasingly shutting out working-class blacks. Middle-class blacks were accused of not caring about the liberation of all African Americans, but only about liberation insofar as it affected their status and acceptance by whites. In the novel, Nigeria Greene, a middle-class black, feels torn between the urge to make a better life for himself by integrating into white culture, and the temptation to join the Black Power call for separating from white culture and any "help" it offers. He attends a benefit sponsored by middle-class blacks and whites:
We so-called "high achievers"-doctors, lawyers, teachers … most of us now makin a buck offa either "puttin down the nigga" or "upliftin the nigga" on some specially "funded" gigs … we're the upper strata welfare recipients, dig? … drinkin our mash outta long-stem champagne glasses… we have turned into the most insensitive bunch you'll find anywhere west of hell.
(Childress, A Hero Ain't Nothin' but a Sandwich, p. 98)
Nigeria's dilemma of feeling as if he must abandon his black roots to reap the rewards of integration into a higher economic strata pricked the conscience of many upwardly mobile blacks.
Conspiracy to quell Black Power with heroin?. Charles Rangel, a Harlem congressman in the early 1970s, said of his district, "Walk along any street uptown and you'll see Harlem's great addict army-slumped over in doorways, stumbling along in a trance, nodding in front of bars, standing in the cold without enough clothes on" (Rangel in Kunnes, p. 83). Officials and residents of Harlem and other slum areas across the country sought to combat heroin use by trying to identify the source of it. Did the problem lie in the individual weakness of every user? Was society's racism causing users to quit on life and nod away until they died? Or did the trouble start with the drug dealers, the ones who, as Ben-jie's stepfather says, "livin offa Benjie's veins, while they ride round in limousines" (A Hero Ain't Nothin' but a Sandwich, p. 126)? Many believed that poverty, racism, and the sense of alienation they produced made people likely addicts. Some suggested a more sinister cause of the heroin epidemic, which by the early 1970s was claiming one out of every six Harlemites. Social scientist Michael Rossman spoke of a white conspiracy to put blacks into an eternal daze. "Before each 'long hot summer' and in each period of ghetto political tension, heroin becomes increasingly available to the ghettoes" (Rossman in Kunnes, p. 87). He contended that the black urban uprisings of the late 1960s frightened white officials, who reacted by up-ping the flow of heroin into ghettoes. He was not alone in this suspicion. A New York Times article in 1971 quoted a police informer as saying that "the police had allowed and encouraged narcotics to be sold in black … communities to create a dependency on heroin and undercut political movement" (Kunnes, p. 88).
African and American roots. In an effort to redefine themselves as something other than second-class citizens, American blacks began to investigate the history of their African ancestors. They also studied modern African culture in search of a unifying and positive identity that the experience of slavery in America had acted to erase. In the novel, teacher Nigeria Greene takes this idea to heart as he fights for a class at his school in an African language, Swahili. Real-life blacks similarly attempted to develop a stronger sense of self by rejecting white standards of beauty, such as straight hair. There was an effort to express a sense of "blackness" by wearing Afro hairstyles and adopting African-style dress to show pride in the ancestry of American blacks.
Speaking Black English was another way of expressing blackness and declaring allegiance to the group in the 1970s. The "street culture" language, which developed in insular communities, helped blacks distinguish themselves from others. When Benjie uses phrases in the novel like "Then I decide to sound on him" rather than "I told him what I think," he's subscribing to a dialect of Black English; speaking the dialect knits him to his community and his history (A Hero Ain't Nothiri but a Sandwich, p. 13).
Though dialects of Black English have consistent rules and grammar of their own, the language has not been readily accepted as an alternative to standard English. In the 1970s tension mounted between blacks promoting solidarity through language and others demanding conformity to standard English. Teachers were alarmed by the use of Black English and the seeming disregard for standard English: "They attribute mistakes [in standard English] to laziness, sloppiness or the child's natural disposition to be wrong" wrote researchers (Labov, p. 4). Educators questioned how students would ever learn to communicate past the ghetto. Some recommended that they be forced to abandon their dialects of English, while others urged teachers to accept and learn them, so that the students would be encouraged to regard standard English as a possible form of expression as well.
The black family. The breakup of the traditional black nuclear family has its roots in the forced separation of families during slave days, when members were sold to different slaveowners. But, as social scientists have pointed out, "family destruction and dispersal did not erode family and kinship ties" (Mintz and Kellogg, p. 69). Instead, African Americans developed extended networks between more distant relatives and other community members as they cooperated to improve their living conditions.
In black ghettos of the 1970s a redefinition of "the family" became necessary as a growing number of fathers, under the strain of unemployment or underemployment, left the family unit. Often such a man's sense of self as one who should provide for his family was undercut by his lack of access to jobs with reasonable pay, and this burden on his pride was sometimes too much to bear. In the novel, after his father leaves, we see Benjie's family reconfigured to form a unit that is "a source of mutual assistance and support … sharing resources and responsibilities" (Mintz and Kellogg, p. 79). Ranson Bell, Benjie's grandmother, lives with the family, taking care of Benjie when his mother is working. Then the family structure shifts again when Benjie's stepfather joins the household. The final unit, a single mother living with a man who is not the father of her children, was not uncommon for families in urban areas affected by racism, poverty, and unemployment.
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